#13 Attaining BA and MA degrees from Columbia College and University (1958–1967)
#12 Walking across Japan, USA (1984–1996), and Europe (1998–2014)
#11 Acting in Bad Timing, 1980 film
#10 Producing, singing The Animals’ Christmas, 1986 album
#9 Writing Still Water, 1989 book of prose poems
#8 Creating the Art Garfunkel concert (4-man, 1-man band), (1991, 2013) and touring the world with it
#7 Acting in Carnal Knowledge, 1971 film
#6 Producing, singing Angel Clare, 1973 album
#5 Producing, singing Breakaway, 1975
#4 Performing The Concert in Central Park, September 19, 1981
#3 Producing, singing Bookends, 1968 album
#2 Producing, singing Bridge Over Troubled Water, 1970 album
#1 Marrying Kathryn (1988), creating James (Arthur Jr., 1990) and Beau (2005)
A train with freight. I am the weight and wit
of an angel incarnate.
THE PITTED KETTLE
The resound of a thousand years. Invented in Ireland,
Grecian earned, wage of a journeyman—
The road of distress and experience—
The broken cup of kindness I bear for a thousand
thousand strides.
It is my pitted kettle—
A helmet holding every picture of the search for
infinity’s resonance,
Dented by the blackbird’s peck in a trek of
speckled radiance.
WALKING NORTHERN GREECE
We live in a state of flux. Only in movement do we recognize life—all things on their way to being. December 2, 2011. Soon my son Arthur Junior will be home for the holidays, but first Beau, his mommy, and I will go to Florida to visit Kim’s mom…my voice continues to mend. It’s almost two years since the end of January 2010, when it suddenly failed. I don’t really know why…months of rest, unison singing to James Taylor, Chet Baker, the Everlys, and my own past work. Bring back the tones, singing in the recording studio, no luck. In late 2010 I took to the stage with mic and speakers, to an empty house of a thousand. Lately I tried to sing three songs to an audience…adrenaline…at the Buddhist Center…too fragile. In two days I’ll try another four-song set in Irvington. I accepted a ninety-minute charity gig for March 2012 in Toronto—five songs, lots of talk. I put away pot smoking on August 21, 2010, and began pills and psychiatry….Beau’s in kindergarten, sadness and anger have appeared in him. Kim is my rock steady love light. Sex has fallen away. Paul Simon is involved with himself. Hopes of an S&G tour are on the back back burner….Sandy Greenberg has become Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute. He wants to cure blindness! He has just given me his 550-page magnificent life story. He is my true brother. I read my book #1,152, Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets. And I continue walking southeast across Europe from Ireland to Istanbul. Jerome and Cindy are in Saugerties (hardly see him). Matt Craig and I work at the cutting room. We sequence the best recorded vocals of my life’s work—two CDs, 34 songs (nine S&Gs). It is The Singer.
My son is dreams. His father is clouds rotating
round. Do dreams fertilize the day the way
that clouds discharge the pent-up rain?
Does the fertile plain evaporate and all
concerns arise at night?
Pan to the east. Europe in the rear. The afternoon opens on Here. “A day of dappled sea-borne clouds,” floating fleece, fringed with gray. Spring in Greece. What a dream to be in—Adriatic to Aegean. This is that other air! Here, green fields of flax, down to the Dardanelles. O Earth—you are too beautiful to tell. Thirteen years of heartswells.
WHO AM I IF I’M NOT A SINGER?
Finally I come to the boiling point—
two hundred eleven degrees.
The heat of frustration has brought me here
to the crucible, to the eye of the beast
that speaks: “You’ll never sing again.”
Eat the anguish; get down on the mat.
Be a reading chair in your mother’s womb,
throw it around the hotel room—
eleven times against the walls.
Scream for equilibrium.
Thirty years of rulership have brought
the Egyptians to just below steam.
When the ruler announces he won’t quite quit,
they chew on disbelief.
That night an Arab soldier wrestles with a dream
of the man he longs to be.
Eyelashes rest on the sleeping Egyptian
and on his burning cheek,
and on the brave singer, mute for a year and a week.
Warriors’ blood speaks eloquently,
so God lifts the temperature one degree.
FEBRUARY 13, 2011
I have a styptic pencil. I use it to stanch the blood.
Surrounded by no exits where tensions stem from all of them,
I hemorrhage from my underworld, my Hades.
Hence the need for styptics. For the river Styx,
my river of hate, begins to flow.
I’m not a famous angel then; I hardly know my name.
Sandy Greenberg, Paul Simon, and Jimmy Webb at my wedding, September 18, 1988
Today was the day I returned to the studio. I declared an end to my personal drought, put doubt in the music business aside, and booked time. I employed a few musicians and paid them very well. Faith in rock ’n’ roll.
Robin Gibb recovers from a coma. What brought him back from the edge—his mother, his doctor, the power to pray? I heard they played him pieces of the album he was making at the time he slipped away. Did he say, in the climb from a very deep hole: “I gotta get back to my rock ’n’ roll”?
All the people around me are elsewhere. Unaware, in their phones. But I work in shades of opalescence. Pinks and blues are tints I use but silver is the essence. Refined, exquisite, timed to the visit of rhyme. Simply tell the story. Teeth and tongue, let the lungs commit to the start of the word. Let the bird in your throat explode in flight. Be there in the millionth of a second. Let the consonant speak, the arrow resound, and the vowel ensue in a quiver of sound.
George, the Greek, at the Nectar café: “The trouble is only in Athens,” he says, “policy is made in the seaport towns. Urns are from Macedonia. The ones who did the fighting, like monuments in Little Rock, are honored on pottery in the Met.”
Without a trace of Thrace, the euro holds in its embrace modern Greece. Here I walk through empty mountains. Beautiful. Still. Thessaloniki ahead. The leaves are in their infancy, but the ways of man are old. The European Union, the Hanseatic League, the Friars, the Masons, the Persian War. Sigma Chi in Vietnam.
How many cycles are buried beneath the earth? Poppies by the roadside. The turn of the tide. Tabula Rasa. Strata Incognita.
The other day I lost my voice it’s all okay
I didn’t like to sing that much.
I always made contact with the fiercest
of lions because I could sing in the cage.
Now I lost rapport and at my
age I’m in a cage once more. The lions are
always in a rage. It’s the business of
performance—no blood, no stage—it’s
what they know. Today, one clawed my
toe and took the smallest piece of me.
On Monday we do another show.
IN A VOCAL BOOTH, RECORDING “LENA,”
HOLLYWOOD, APRIL 27, 2012
I see Tom Wolfe. He lives down the end of my block. White suit and boater—a wonderful man. His frame is askew now (a lifetime of love for the pen?). Closer to me are the Golden Rule establishments: the Steiner School, grounded in the love of fairness, sitting side-by-side with the mayor (“he with the gold rules”). I like this man enormously—he’s dear, he’s decent, and seems like a lover of excellence. I am adjacent. I cultivate naïveté. I imagine we’re all in love. Hearts on fire, t
he glory of the Gift makes forms of blasé a pack of lies. We strive to get to heaven and stay out of trouble behind our watchful eyes.
Can the world live with a nuclear Iran, which, like Japan, has nuclear power but not weapons, or am I at the flashpoint near the Strait of Hormuz in Dubai in the Mall of the Emirates at the base of a ski slope, changing at the lockers across from a black-robed woman? She, a Muslim; I, a Jew, looking at the veiled face and into her eyes for a clue.
I’m a thousand times faster than the swiftest snail.
I beat a running turtle five hundred to one.
To compare me to the hare, where I would trail, is unfair.
I’m not a gazelle; I’m not on the run.
It’s only the road to Istanbul
I choose my pace and take my place—
where someone decided a brand-new pope’ll
preside in the East in Constantinople.
I don’t know sailing, but I know you tack to the wind. The sun is south at one at the end of May. My path is east-northeast. At 11:15, the sun is beside me to guide my way.
The walk is a week to Thessaloniki. I set my invisible sail and track to the sun. Through the day it circles my starboard shoulder. And leaves me cold and lost when clouds roll in.
Oliver’s giving my son the cold shoulder. He doesn’t want to be his friend anymore. How can I tell him that shade was made for the light? How can I find my way in the afternoon?
Together we travel, lured to the aft, warm in the leeward wing of the craft.
MAYBE 2010’S THE YEAR OF GIVING IT UP.
I started it with the end of singing in the beginning
of the year. Then Philip Roth stopped writing.
Tony La Russa, his managing days are through.
Singing, writing, and baseball too—
what are the three of us gonna do?
But do you ever really stop the thing you love?
If Philip had insomnia and inspiration struck,
would he really turn on the television?
When Tony’s at his grandson’s game and asked
to give advice, won’t he contribute without
thinking twice?
See Arthur in that hospital—he steals away
to that stairwell there, and returns to “The Lord’s Prayer.”
I don’t have to sing no more no more. I’m crushed and broken. Who cares? No one wants to deal with me. I tangle with all their confusion and end up displaying how ugly man can be, to my lover and my seven-year-old. I can’t escape the Big Reveal—I am painfully flawed. I live in heartbreak hotel.
ROAD MAP
1. Root your faith. Deeply. Firmly. Use family.
2. Challenge everything. Fame is value plus spin, or just spin (bandwagonism).
3. Pleasure: deep (four-year vocal recovery) vs. shallow (video games). Hard work feels good.
4. Like yourself. Stay interesting.
5. Practice the “downshift”; love baseline nothingness, then everything counts (June light: 5:30 p.m., 6:30 p.m., 7:30 p.m.).
6. Love air, breeze, wind.
7. Leave shirt out (artist style but showing belly in profile) vs. tuck in and blouse to conceal?
8. Vent and get release (but be annoying to those around you) vs. hold it in check (gentleman’s harness)?
9. Make your life music—let rhythm be civility, regularity, dependability, manners, and morality; let the melody be your personality.
10. Don’t be a cynic. Be busy making value, in spite of the milieu. Though you may not link The cause to The effect—good causes make good effects.
My father’s doctor, educated Flatbush-style, so pleased with himself—he had walked a mile to meet my father at my flat—“the value of walking,” the strutting hen, Dr. Leifer, eighty-one then, gone now.
If you write and the language has color and tone,
accented syllables dance,
rhyme and intelligence in each refrain—
if you then call it poetry, the brain goes numb.
Like Prince Potemkin—a war flares up in Crimea,
the fleet sails out, he vanquishes the Turks,
the vessels swell with victory—
and the prince gets hemorrhoids.
The Garves Four, 2008
I do not trust my country. I firmly believe that the profit motive destroys the joy, the soul, the authenticity of every endeavor. What about these statins in my body? “What a hit these statins are and deserve to be!” my doctor said (like Michael McDonald’s “What a Fool Believes”?).
Now it’s twenty years later, accountability time in your daily pill. (Did LDL go out of fashion?) Do the healthy cells in my body nearby say: “Here comes the Daily Alien.” It’s pinpoint bombing going after the number, the cholesterol-chart-level number.
“To us healthy cells, it feels like a forced affair.” Foolish trust in big business, does it deliver a genuine life-creating product? “So knowing and intrusive, corporate shortcuts, a polluted version of what recently was only alien,” say the cells.
Reclaim your trust. Invest in sweeter things. If money disappeared, what would really be left?
INVEST IN SWEETER THINGS. SING AGAIN.
“The old hooty owl hooty hoots from above:
‘Tammy’s in love.’ ”
Am I old and jaded
Or did the world all just go flat?
Once you were an icon if you made it.
Now I wonder about words like that.
Into the tunnel of serious prep. Friday the 5th, 10:30 a.m. Don’t talk no family no phone no concern. Sing easy sing more walk and sing walk more hotel room stretching sit-ups push-ups hamstrings eat light don’t eat read France under Germany 1941—world fear on the day I arrived.
Finishing the picture nicely is only for neatness freaks.
Reaching for the pith of the thing is one’s true occupation.
And so the soul emerges. More hidden than the heart, so
undefined, the soul.
THE TEXTER
I was on a stage last night in the common age we live in. The theater crowd was restive. I was asked to hold the start time—the earl had not yet come. At eight minutes after, I felt for the audience and came on. Now he strides down quickly to his first-row seat on the center aisle. I bring to the night a life of singing, a damaged voice, an artist’s reputation—a public display of recovery. The earl is the town council leader, important, all manly.
I open with a reading of mine: “I always made peace with the fiercest of lions because I could sing in the cage. Now I lost rapport, and stand before one on the stage. The rude lion reaches for blood…” The man we held the show up for is a modern man. He sits nine feet before me. And in my second song he begins to text!
I am thrown by the rules of today: Do cell phone talkers imagine a curtain surrounds them? Am I to disappear in the backdrop of the texting life? I muster up good nature and peer from the lip of the stage into the texter’s lap at his handheld thing. I smile, but it’s pistols at sunrise. I carry on singing, but I only think of him and the next techno-spear randomly hurled from the dark. The singing falters severely. “Scarborough Fair” is leaden. The theater people understand—they are called to witness the pith of my profession.
Suddenly, around the fifth song, I stop the show and say to him, “How did you imagine I wouldn’t be completely thrown by seeing you texting right before me?” “Because you’re a pro,” he shoots back. The speed of his projected retort tells me he’s a politician. “I need to rest,” I say, and walk off…I sit in the dressing room minute after minute…now does the soul define itself?
WHAT DO I THINK OF AS I WALK THESE DAYS?
I think of cholesterol. Wasn’t it Tim Russert who died of a sudden artery block near the heart? I think of the brilliant actress I married, how adorable she was doing “Easy Money” in her set at Birdland last Monday….I remember Paul Simon playing poker in high school. Concealing his emotions, he consistently won. The mind is glued to the peopl
e we know, but the walker’s home is in the sky. All three hundred sixty degrees of horizon….There—my father’s tomato plants, how proud he was. And of his roses. He married one. The roses grew against the cinder blocks of our one-car garage. Twelve feet across was the white picket fence that marked our yard from the Skinners, Henry and Olive. I was Tom Sawyer soon to meet Huck Finn, and my mother, Rose, was dearer than Aunt Polly could possibly be. As near as sunlight, I can hardly see her. I basked within and sang with private joy. She was the older sister after five brothers. Her hair was frizzy, she had short fingers, workwoman’s hands. And a very beautiful face. She was the queen of mild, in the battle blaze of my father’s loud frustrations. She teared up when she grated onions and potatoes, but Chanukah had to have latkes. She ran on a mother’s motor, and so it was stunning when she gave me a gift. (We just didn’t do gifts in our house.) There, in white tissue, fingers so elegant, were fur-lined black leather gloves. I ran to my bedroom to cry. I was too touched. What is it all but luminous. I can’t look at everything hard enough.
So I walk to see. Unglued and apart.
IN ALL SUCH WAYS I STRUGGLE TO BRING A LOST VOICE BACK.
My audience has grown from seventy people in Yonkers in 2013 to a thousand today. I no longer supplement my show with Q&A. The singing doesn’t falter quite as much. Hitting the high notes is no longer like diving off a high board, hoping there’ll be water in the pool. Now there’s only an occasional death swoon. I have learned to trust in the audience’s love. Displaying authentic bravery speaks for itself. Perfectionism is over. I work with smiling self-acceptance and read my “poetic bits.” The new show is less is more, taken to the extreme, just Tab Laven on Martin guitar and the voice in all its nuance.
What Is It All But Luminous Page 11